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Edmontonians Of Humanity: Sean McAnally

A weekend ago we were sitting outside having breakfast at Blue Plate Diner on 104th St. when Sean McAnally walked by.

King Louie on a walkabout

In itself Sean McAnally's walking by is not a notable event. But it can lead to one. That's because Sean is good at delivering stuff: parcels, music, and things you think about for awhile.
Sean was with Shawna and it was market day and they were walking Louis, a dog rescued from Mexico. That led, naturally, to the question of which Disney Jungle Book character Sean's brother Rob most closely resembled. We played with King Louie, the jungle VIP who reached the top and had to stop and was troubled by that fact, before settling on Baloo.

And then we talked about whether human beings would get outside for exercise as much if they didn't have to do good by their dogs and get them out to stretch their four legs.

Small talk got a little bigger when Sean shared what he's leaned from from his walks, summarized here in nucleic form.

1. There are seasons, and
2. There's lots of litter on the ground.

He's right on #2, but we can save private garbage on public space another day. His point in #1, as he explained, is that when you're in a car or truck or delivery van, you can be just driving through. Walking connects you to the sidewalk, to the weather, and, when you're kicking through the brittle leaves of fall, to the seasons.

Cool. And connected to the way Jane Jacobs says city dwellers come to feel a sense of place. This is from p. 129 of my edition of The Death And Life Of Great American Cities:

Few people, unless they live in a world of paper maps, can identify with an abstraction called a district, or care much about it. Most of us identify with a place in the city because we use it, and get to know it reasonably intimately. We take our two feet and move around in it and come to count on it.

Edmontonians Of Humanity is an occasional feature in this blogspace. It's a way to say thanks to the real people I know who help me remember the real things I've read, or the other way around.

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